H. M. Tomlinson


Henry Major Tomlinson was a British writer and journalist. He was known for anti-war and travel writing, novels and short stories, especially of life at sea. He was born and died in London.

Life

Tomlinson was brought up in Poplar, London. He worked as a shipping clerk, and then as a reporter for the Morning Leader newspaper; he travelled up the Amazon River for it.
In World War I he was an official correspondent for the British Army, in France. In 1917 he returned to work with H. W. Massingham on The Nation, which opposed the war. He left the paper in 1923, when Massingham resigned because of a change of owner and political line. His 1931 book Norman Douglas was one of the first biographies of that scandalous but then much admired writer.

Works

Tomlinson was much admired in the 1920s, though not by everyone. Frederic P. Mayer wrote in the Virginia Quarterly Review: